In my early forties I thought of myself as a rational woman, but while I could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when my nerves twitched like a rabbit’s at the least sound, regardless of what I had been reading or talking about. On the many good nights and the few bad the chances of a burglar breaking in were exactly the same: the difference was within myself and signified nothing which I could identify. And I had always been like that over the possibility of pregnancy.
For several months it would not occur to me to worry, but then I would be convinced, perhaps as much as a fortnight before the month’s end, that this time it had happened. The anxiety seemed in itself an indication: why this sudden fret if there were no reason? I would start working out how to find the money for an abortion, or whether I was capable of bringing up a child single-handed, and when the anxiety proved groundless I would feel foolish as well as relieved.
This last month had been an easy-minded one. I happened, for once, to know the date on which, in this sense, it should end, having filled an idle moment by marking little crosses in my diary some way ahead; but although I was often a few days early and never late, I was so far from worrying that I hardly noticed when the day came and went. Six more days passed before I said to myself: ‘Hadn’t you better start acknowledging this? The curse is six days overdue and your breasts are hurting.’
Rational? How did I square that with the fact that, in spite of the fluctuations in anxiety, I had taken no precautions against pregnancy for almost two years? From time to time, at the end of an anxious month, I had thought of it: ‘If I’m let off this time I’ll never be such a fool again.’ But I never did anything about it. ‘Not today,’ ‘Not this week,’ ‘Another time,’ or even, ‘What’s the point? I’ll only put the damned things in a drawer and forget to use them.’ The mere thought of it seemed too tedious to bear. Although I had twice become pregnant in the past, that was now such a long time ago, and surely I had reached an age when it was less likely? After all, month after month had gone by to confirm my optimism.
If anyone had said to me, ‘There can be only one reason for an unmarried woman in her early forties to ignore good sense so stubbornly: she does it not from an optimistic belief that she will not conceive, but because of an exactly opposite subconscious optimism: deep inside herself she wants a child,’ I would have answered, ‘Of course she does. I do know that, really. I suppose I must have been choosing to ignore it.’ But although I had not been able to prevent my subconscious from undermining my reason, I saw nothing against putting it in its place. I had overruled it twice before and had felt no ill effects. ‘All right, so you want a baby. Who doesn’t? But as things are you can’t have one – I’m sorry but there it is, too bad for you.’ Neither time had it put up any fight. It had accepted its frustration placidly – and placidly it had resumed its scheming.
I had once met a man who had been persuaded to consult an analyst about, of all things, his constipation. He had found the experience interesting and beneficial, and summed it up in words that delighted me: ‘It’s fascinating to learn what an old juggins one’s subconscious is.’ That was what I now felt: what an old juggins! What a touching and in some ways admirable old juggins! I saw my subconscious plodding along, pigheaded, single-minded, an old tortoise lumbering through undergrowth, heaving itself over fallen branches, subsiding into holes full of dead leaves. Sometimes, no doubt, the obstacles had been almost too much for him and he had lain, panting slightly, staring up at the sky and blinking in apparent bewilderment, but then a blunt foreleg would begin to grope again, his toes would scratch for purchase and on he would go. The question was this: did I say, ‘Impressive though such persistence is, he is still a juggins,’ or did I say, ‘Juggins he may be, but such persistence is impressive’? Did I, in other words, slap my subconscious down again by finding the necessary cash and the obliging doctor from the past (if he was still taking such risks), or did I capitulate and have this child?
The reasons against it were these: I was unmarried, forty-three years old and had no private income. I could live comfortably on what I earned, with nothing to spare. I would like to preserve these conditions.
The reasons for it were these: if I did not have a child now I would never have one, and I loved Barry, its father.
Barry was married – well married, to an admirable woman who had done him no wrong and to whom he owed much. He had begun an affair simply because he had been married for seven years, was no longer romantically in love with his wife, and was polygamous by nature. He had come to take the affair seriously because we suited each other in every way, one of our strongest bonds being that neither of us was possessive. He might have been described as sitting pretty, married to a good, dependable wife, without whom he could not imagine himself, and in love with a good, dependable mistress to whom he could turn whenever he wished. But it was more complex than that. I was nine years older than he, which, together with my nature, had given me a certain authority over the situation. He saw me as having chosen this form of relationship rather than having been persuaded or manoeuvred into it, and he was right: there was no reason why he should develop a sense of responsibility towards me except in our own terms of honesty and tenderness. It was a perfect situation for him, since he had no money and was trying to live by writing; but the fact that one partner is well suited does not necessarily mean that the other is ill used. I myself might have condemned some other woman’s lover in a similar situation, but I knew him and myself too well to condemn him. He was what he was: the person with whom, being as he was, I was most at home. What, then, would be the point of wishing him otherwise?
And could I make him otherwise, if I wanted to? No. And I didn’t mind that, because I was perfectly willing to accept that we, as we both were, were each other’s unexpected bonus from life. It was this that had established so much ease and sweetness between us. If, when I told him I was pregnant, he were to offer to leave his wife and come to me, I would be quite as anxious as I would be happy. I would not, whatever I decided, try to make him do that. Perhaps this was cowardice – a fear of actually having to face a lack of success which I thought I could envisage with equanimity. Or perhaps it was vanity – a desire to go on representing freedom, pleasure, stimulation, all the joys of love rather than its burdens. Or perhaps it was really what I would like it to be: the kind of respect for another person’s being that I would wish to have paid to my own. But there was no doubt that, if I was pregnant, life would be a great deal easier if my lover and my love were otherwise than they were.
So it would be sensible to have an abortion. In my experience it was not a profoundly disagreeable thing to have. The worst part of the actual operation, performed under a local anaesthetic, in the circumstances prevailing at the time when I first experienced it, was the grotesque position into which one had been trussed on the table. I had found that I could see a tiny but clear reflection of myself in the globe of the lampshade above me, and at that I almost lost grip but screwed my eyes shut instead. There was this humiliating ugliness, and there were sounds, and for a few moments there was a dim sensation of pain. If the doctor was businesslike and kind, treating one (as mine had done) like an ordinary patient, there was no sinister or shaming atmosphere to contend with. One was simply having a quick little operation for a sensible reason . . . So it was odd that I should start to shiver slightly as I thought about it. No, I did not feel that a murder is committed during that operation. I would go so far as to say that I was sure it was not: no separate existence, at that stage, was being ended, any more than when a sperm was prevented from meeting an egg. But that old juggins, the pin-headed, pig-headed tortoise behind my reason: he was tough, he was good at recovering from setbacks, but at the prospect of yet another of them he was showing signs of turning into a porcupine. He wanted me to have this child.
Having acknowledged the situation, I found myself no nearer a decision, only slightly more aware of reluctance towards either course. It was still early. I could have an abortion, if I so decided, at any time within the next three months. So the best thing to do seemed to me to be nothing: go blank, drift for a week or so, think about it as little as possible and see what happened. Perhaps I would wake up one morning knowing what I wanted to do.
The next two weeks dragged. I managed to keep my mind on other things for much of the time, but the fact of pregnancy was always there, lying in wait for any unoccupied moment. It seemed common sense not to begin worrying again at least until I had missed my second period, but long before that date came I felt that my condition had endured for months. Each morning, when I awoke, I would lie still for a minute or two trying to overhear my state of mind, but all I picked up was irritation and depression at being in this quandary. About ten days after the start of my ‘truce’ I spent a weekend in the country with my mother, and the depression increased: supposing I had the child, how appalling the family explanations would be, how impossible it was to imagine the degree of consternation such a decision would raise in my mother and the rest of the family. In the train on the way back to London I looked up from my book and bumped, as usual, into, ‘What am I going to do?’ ‘Oh God,’ I thought, ‘I do wish it would all go away.’
‘Well,’ I thought next morning, ‘if that’s the best I can do I suppose I had better make it go away: get the money in, anyway.’ There was a sum waiting for me in New York, where I had planned soon to spend a holiday. If I called in half of that, would there be enough left for the holiday? Probably not. Resentment and disappointment were added to the depression, but I called my agent with a story of unexpected bills as a result of moving house, and he cabled me the money at once. That done, I had only to call the doctor – his number, on a grubby scrap of paper, discreetly minus his name, still lurked at the back of a drawer in my dressing table after all those years. ‘I’ll do it soon,’ I thought. ‘Next week, perhaps. I’ve got the money and that’s the main thing.’ I spent a couple of days in a rage at missing my first chance to visit New York, and another couple arguing that I needn’t miss it after all: if I spent only three weeks there instead of four, and lived very cheaply, I could manage. If that were so, I was not only being sensible, I was not going to suffer for it, so there was nothing to be depressed about any more.
It was on the fifth morning after the arrival of the money – a morning in April – that I awoke congratulating myself on living in my new flat and opening my eyes in my new bedroom. It was the top floor of a house which might almost be in the country – the last house in a short street which projected like a little promontory into a park. All the windows looked onto trees and grass, and my bedroom window had gardens as well, the long range of gardens behind the houses of the street at right angles to mine. Cherry and pear trees were in flower, and a fine magnolia; daffodils and narcissi twinkled in the grass. Soon the lilacs would be out, and the hawthorns, and the irises – it was a galloping spring after a mild winter. The sun shone through my bedroom window, and the birds were singing so loudly that they had woken me before my alarm clock went off: each garden seemed to have its own blackbird. I got out of bed to lean out of the window and sniff the green smells, and found myself saying: ‘What a morning for birds and bees and buds and babies.’
This sentence was still humming in my mind as I walked to the bus stop, past the walls of more gardens, not high enough to conceal the trees and shrubs behind them. During the previous winter, before moving into the flat, I had thought as I walked this way: ‘This will soon be my part of London – I shall see that pear, that crab-apple tree in flower, and then heavy with dusty summer green, and then with hard little London fruit on their branches – they will be familiar landmarks.’ And there they were, going into their spring performance with abandon against a brilliant blue sky, part of my daily walk to the bus. ‘It is a lovely place to live,’ I thought. ‘I suppose I am going to have this baby after all.’
I was late, I had to run for a bus, those words evaporated and no thought of my predicament disturbed my morning’s work. Then my business partner came into my room, to spring on me a discussion of long-term plans for the firm. Someone might be persuaded to join us and if he did shares would have to be reallocated, certain changes of status would have to be made. ‘It concerns you, too,’ he said, ‘so you must think it over.’ I had a slight sensation of breathlessness and could feel my face flushing, but I made no decision to say what in fact I did say: ‘I don’t know that it will concern me. I may not be here then. I’m going to have a baby.’ And inside my head I was saying: ‘At last! The cat has jumped at last.’ I was also saying: ‘Oh lord, now I’ve done it!’ – but the dismay was a laughing dismay, not a horrified one.
Perhaps my mood would not have held if my news had been received differently. As it was, my partner, a very old friend, said: ‘You mean you’re pregnant now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Not yet . . . of course it may be a mistake, but I’m sure it’s not.’
‘Well, then, are you mad?’ he said, sitting down on the radiator, frowning. ‘How do you think you’re going to support the child if you don’t stay on here?’
‘Oh, somehow – people do manage. And I thought it might be a bit embarrassing in the office . . .’
‘Good God! If anyone’s embarrassed they can bloody well get out!’
Then, dropping his poker face, he asked if I had really thought he would expect me to leave, and I answered that of course I hadn’t, but it had seemed that it would be such an imposition . . . each of us slightly awkward at being pitched so suddenly into full awareness of our long and usually taken-for-granted affection for each other, and me the more so for having to produce thoughts which I had not yet formed about the practical side of this pregnancy. Then he kissed me and said that he was happy for me, and I was left grinning across my desk like the Cheshire cat, established in my full glory as an Expectant Unmarried Mother.
After that I was happy. I was quite often frightened too, but on a superficial level compared with the happiness. The birth would be easy. I could take as much time off as I needed, drawing my salary all the while, and for so long as I could stay at home all would be simple. The house in which I had my flat was owned by a cousin of mine who herself lived in the rest of it, and who from the moment I told her of the pregnancy was eager to help. Neither of us had much money – I myself had to let one of the rooms in my flat to help pay its modest rent – so I was anxious not to become a financial burden on my cousin, but it was reassuring to know that if the worst came to the worst I would never be chased for the rent. But I could not take advantage of that reassurance for more than a short time, and didn’t want to do even that. And in addition to my usual living expenses I would have to pay for someone to care for the child while I was working, and for its food and clothes, and for its education – no, it would go to a state school, of course, there was a good one nearby – but for its bicycle and its roller skates and its holidays by the sea . . . Year after year of financial strain stretched ahead. Financial strain and, to start with at any rate, physical exhaustion: office all day, child for every other minute – would I ever again be free to write? Not for years, anyway.
And no less frightening was the thought of the gap in the child’s life where a father ought to be. Material considerations could be smothered by ‘I’ll manage somehow – people do’; of course I would manage when I had to. But the argument advanced by my more sober-minded friends, and by my own mind as well, that one has no right to wish this lopsided upbringing on any child – that was less easy. Surely only an exceptional woman could reasonably expect to steer her child comfortably through the shoals of illegitimacy, and could I make any claim to be exceptional? To this question I found I could make no answer. I could only say: ‘Whatever happens, whatever the child itself may one day say (and there probably will come a time when it will say, “I never asked to be born”), I believe that it will prefer to exist rather than not.’ But the real answer was not in those words, nor in any others that I might think up. It was simply in the rock-like certainty that the cat had jumped; that now, come what may and whatever anyone said, it was beyond me to consider an abortion. When I tried to force myself to think about it, I felt as though something physical happened in my skull, as though an actual shutter came down between the front part of my brain, just behind my eyes, where the thought began, and the back of my brain, where it would have to go if it were to be developed.
The biggest immediate worry was how to tell my mother, whose outlook would make it very hard for her to accept such news. I veered between a desire to get the worst over by writing at once, and a longing to put it off for ever. Barry advised me to put it off for a month or so, just in case something went wrong, and finally I agreed, throwing a sop to my itch to get it over by writing in advance the letter I would send later, choosing a time just before one of my visits home so that my mother could get over the worst of the shock before we discussed it. I enjoyed writing that letter: putting into words how much I wanted a child and how determined to have this one I had now become. I found my letter so convincing that I couldn’t believe my mother would not agree.
The longing to tell everyone else was strong. I scolded myself, arguing that when I began to bulge would be soon enough; people did have miscarriages, and no discreet woman would announce a pregnancy before the fourth month. But with every day discretion became less important, jubilation grew stronger, and I had soon told everyone with whom I was intimate and some with whom I was not. Almost all my friends appeared to be delighted for me, and their support gave me great pleasure. Sometimes they said I was brave, and I enjoyed that too, in spite of knowing that courage did not come into it; it was just that the tortoise had won. The interest and sympathy that seemed to surround me was like a good wine added to a delicious dinner.
Barry was, in a detached way, pleased. The pregnancy made no difference to the form of our relationship, but it did deepen it: his tenderness and attention were a comfort and a pleasure. I wondered, sometimes, what would happen about that once the child was born: would an ‘uncle’ in its life instead of a father be a good thing or a bad one? We would have to see. I knew that if it proved a bad thing I would have to lose Barry – would lose him without hesitation however great the pain – but for the present having him there was a large, warm part of the happiness which carried the anxieties like driftwood on its broad tide.
I felt gloriously well, hungry, lively and pretty, without a single qualm of sickness and with only a shadow of extra fatigue at the end of a long day, from time to time. ‘Well, you seem to be all right,’ they said to me at the hospital clinic which I began to attend. During the long waits at this clinic I watched the other women and thought that none of them looked so well or so pleased as I did. At my first visit I kept quiet, half anxious and half amused by doubts as to how my spinsterhood would be treated by the nurses and doctors, but once I discovered that it was taken not only calmly but with extra kindness, I relaxed. One of the other expectant mothers, very young, was like myself in having suffered nothing in the way of sickness or discomfort, and the two of us made an almost guilty smug corner together. I contrived to read details about myself over the shoulder of a nurse who was filling in a form about me, and glowed with ridiculous pride at all the ‘satisfactories’ and at ‘nipples: good’.
However simple and quick the examination itself, the clinic proved always to take between two and three hours, so I arranged to see my own doctor regularly instead. As I left the clinic for the last time I happened to be thinking – worrying – about the problem of the child’s care while I was at the office, when a man leant out of the cab of a passing truck and shouted at me: ‘That’s right, love – keep smiling!’ Worrying I may have been, but I was also grinning all over my face.
Those weeks of April and May were the only ones in my life when spring was wholly, fully beautiful. All other springs carried with them regret at their passing. If I thought, ‘Today the white double cherries are at their most perfect,’ it summoned up the simultaneous awareness: ‘Tomorrow the edges of their petals will begin to turn brown.’ This time a particularly ebullient, sundrenched spring simply existed for me. It was as though, instead of being a stationary object past which a current was flowing, I was flowing with it, in it, at the same rate. It was a happiness new to me, but it felt very ancient, and complete.
One Saturday, soon after my last clinic, Barry came to see me at lunchtime. I had got up early and done a big shop, but not a heavy one, because a short time before I became pregnant I had bought a basket on wheels (was it coincidence that several of my purchases just before the condition were of things suited to it: that basket, the slacks which were rather too loose round the waist, with the matching loose top?). I left the basket at the bottom of the stairs for him to bring up, because, strong and well though I felt, I was taking no foolish risks. We ate a good lunch, both of us cheerful and relaxed. After it he was telling me a funny story when I interrupted with, ‘Wait a minute, I must go to the loo – tell me when I get back,’ and hurried out to have a pee, wanting to get back quickly for the end of the story. When I saw blood on the toilet paper my mind went, for a moment, quite literally blank.
So I got up and went slowly back into the sitting room, thinking, ‘To press my fingers against my cheek like this must look absurdly overdramatic.’
‘I’m bleeding,’ I said in a small voice.
He scrambled up from the floor, where he’d been lying, and said, ‘What do you mean? Come and sit down. How badly?’
‘Only a very little,’ I said, and began to tremble.
He took me by the shoulders and pulled me against him, saying quieting things, saying, ‘It’s all right, we’ll ring the doctor, it’s probably nothing,’ and although I didn’t know I was going to start crying, I felt myself doing it. I had not yet been able to tell what I was feeling, but suddenly I was having to control myself hard in order not to scream. ‘The important thing,’ he said, ‘is to find out.’ He went to fetch the telephone directory and said: ‘Come on, now, ring the doctor.’
The telephone was near my chair, so I didn’t have to move, which I felt was important. The doctor was off duty for the weekend, but a stand-in answered. Any pain? No. How much bleeding? I explained how little. Then there was nothing to be done but to go to bed at once and stay there for forty-eight hours. ‘Does this necessarily mean a miscarriage?’ I asked. No, certainly not. How would I know if it turned into one? It would seem like an exceptionally heavy period, with the passing of clots. If that happened I must telephone again, but otherwise just stay lying down.
Barry ran out to buy me sanitary towels. During the few minutes I was alone I found myself crying again, flopped over the arm of my chair, tears streaming down my face, saying over and over again in a sort of whispered scream, ‘I don’t want to have a miscarriage, I don’t want to have a miscarriage.’ I knew it was a silly thing to be doing, and when my cousin, alerted by Barry, came, I was relieved to find that I could pull myself together, sit up and talk.
They put me to bed, and we talked about other women we knew of who had bled during pregnancy with no ill effect, and I soon became calm. During the next two days the bleeding became even less, but it did not quite stop, and over the phone my doctor repeated his colleague’s words: no one could do anything, it was not necessarily going to be a miscarriage, I would know all right if it became one, and I must stay in bed until it stopped. I was comfortable in my pretty bedroom, reading Jane Austen almost non-stop for her calming quality (I reread the whole of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and The Watsons in four days), listening to the radio and doing a little office work. By the fourth day my chief anxiety had become not the possibility of a miscarriage, but the fear that this slight bleeding might tie me to my bed not for days but for weeks. A bedridden pregnancy would be bad enough for anyone, but for me, entirely dependent as I was on friends who all had jobs or families . . . How could they possibly go on doing as much as they were doing now for much longer?
I was lucky in one way: anxiety, fear and certain kinds of misery always had an almost anaesthetic effect on me, making my mind and feelings sluggish. Under such stresses I shrank into the moment, just doing the next thing to be done, and sleeping a lot. So those four days passed in a state of suspended emotion rather than in unhappiness – suspended emotion stabbed every now and then with irritation at the absurdity of having to fear disaster when I was feeling as well as ever. It was ridiculous!
During the night of the fourth day I came slowly out of sleep at three in the morning to a vague feeling that something was amiss. It took me a minute or two of sleepy wondering before I identified it more exactly. Not since I was a girl had I suffered any pain during my period – I had almost forgotten what kind of pain it was – but now . . . yes. In a dim, shadowy way it was that old pain that was ebbing and flowing in my belly. When it ebbed I thought, ‘Quick, go to sleep again, you were imagining it.’ But it came back, its fluctuations confirming its nature. More anaesthetized than ever, barely awake, I got up, fetched a bucket from the kitchen and a newspaper to fold and use as a lid, and a big towel from the linen cupboard. I arranged all this beside my bed and went to sleep again.
When I woke an hour and a half later it was because blood was trickling over my thigh. ‘This is it’: dull resentment was what I felt. I hitched myself out of bed and over the bucket – and woke with a cold shock at the thudding gush, the sensation that a cork had blown. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ I thought, ‘I didn’t know it would be like this.’ Blood ran fast for about half a minute, then dwindled to a trickle. Swaddling myself in the towel, I lay back on the bed, telling myself that no doubt it had to be fairly gruesome to start with.
After that the warning trickle came every ten or fifteen minutes, out over the bucket I went, terrified that I might overturn it with a clumsy gesture as I removed and restored the newspaper lid. The gush was never as violent as the first one, but each time it was violent and it did not diminish. I tried not to see the dark, clotted contents of the bucket – it was only when I saw it that I almost began to cry. There was a peppery smell of blood, but if I turned my head in a certain way I could catch a whiff of fresh air from the window, which lessened it. It was already light when I woke the second time, and soon after that the first blackbird began to sing. I lay still between the crises, watching the sun’s first rays coming into the room and trying to make out how many blackbirds were singing behind the one in our own garden.
My cousin would be coming up to give me breakfast. She usually came at eight – but it might be later. ‘If she doesn’t come till late . . .’ I thought, and became tearful. Then I decided to wait until seven-thirty, by which time the bleeding would surely be diminished, and telephone her – with the towel between my legs I would be able to get to the sitting room, where the phone was. The thought of telephoning the doctor myself was too much, because if his number were engaged or he were out I couldn’t bear it; my cousin must do it. Time was going very fast, I noticed, looking at the alarm clock on the corner of my chest of drawers. That was something, anyway.
I had come out in a heavy sweat after the first flow, but it was not until about six-thirty that it happened again. Then sweat streamed off me and I was icy cold, and – worse – I began to feel sick. The thought of having to complicate the horror by vomiting into that dreadful bucket put me in a panic, so when the sweating was over and the nausea had died away, immediately after another violent flow, I knew I must get to the telephone now. I huddled the towel between my legs, stood up, took two steps towards the door, felt myself swaying, thought quite clearly, ‘They are wrong when they say everything goes black; it’s not going black, it’s disappearing. I must fall onto the bed.’ Which I did.
The next hour was vague, but I managed to follow my routine: bucket, paper back, flat on bed, wrap dressing gown over belly. I began to feel much iller, with more sweating, more cold, more nausea. When I heard my lodger moving about in his room next door I knew I had to call him. He knew nothing of my pregnancy – thought I had been in bed with an upset stomach. We were so far from being intimate that even if I had thought of him I might have felt unable to call him. Now I tapped on the wall and called his name, but he didn’t hear. A little more time passed, and I heard him in the passage outside my door and called again. This time he heard, and answered, and I told him to go downstairs and fetch my cousin. ‘You mean now?’ came his startled voice through the door. ‘Yes, quickly.’ Oh, that was wonderful, the sound of his feet hurrying away, and only a minute or two later my door opened and in came my cousin.
One look and she ran for the telephone without saying a word. She caught the doctor in his surgery, two minutes before he went out on a call. He arrived so soon that it seemed almost at once, looked into the bucket, felt my pulse, pulled down my eyelid and left the room quickly to call an ambulance and alert the hospital. I felt hurt that neither he nor my cousin had spoken to me, but now my cousin said could I drink a cup of tea and I felt it would be wonderful – but couldn’t drink it when it appeared. The relief of not having to worry any more would have been exquisite, if it had not given me more time to realize how ill I was feeling. The ambulance men wrapped me in a beautiful big red blanket and said not to worry about bleeding all over it (so that’s why ambulance blankets are usually red). The breath of fresh air as I was carried across the pavement made me feel splendidly alert after the dreadful dizziness of being carried downstairs, so I asked for a cigarette and they said it wasn’t allowed in the ambulance but I could have one all the same, and to put the ash in the sick bowl. One puff, and I felt much worse than ever; my cousin had to wipe the sweat off my forehead with a paper handkerchief. There was a pattern by then: a slowly mounting pain, a gush of blood, the sweating and nausea following at once and getting worse every time, accompanied by a terrible feeling that was not identifiable as pain but simply as illness. It made me turn my head from side to side and moan, although it seemed wrong to moan without intolerable pain.
The men carried me into a cubicle in the casualty department, and I didn’t want them to leave because they were so kind. As soon as I was there the nausea came again, worse than ever so that this time I vomited, and was comforted because one of the men held my head and said, ‘Never mind, dear.’ A nurse said brusquely, while I was vomiting (trying to catch me unawares, I supposed), ‘Did you have an injection to bring this on?’ My ‘no’ came out like a raucous scream, which made me feel apologetic, so I had to gasp laboriously, ‘I wanted most terribly to have this baby.’ The man holding my head put his other hand on my arm and gave it a great squeeze, and that was the only time anyone questioned me.
My head cleared a bit after I had been sick. I noticed that the nurse couldn’t find my pulse, and that when the doctor who soon came was listening to my heart through his stethoscope, he raised his eyebrows a fraction and pursed his lips, and then turned to look at my face, not as one looks at a face to communicate, but with close attention. I also noticed that they could never hear my answers to their questions, although I thought I was speaking normally. ‘They think I’m really bad,’ I said to myself, but I didn’t feel afraid. They would do whatever had to be done to make me better.
It went on being like that up on the ward, when they began to give me blood transfusions. My consciousness was limited to the narrow oblong of my body on the stretcher, trolley or bed, and to the people doing things to it. Within those limits it was sharp, except during the recurring waves of horribleness, but it did not extend to speculation. When a nurse, being kind, said, ‘You may not have lost the baby – one can lose a great deal of blood and the baby can still be all right,’ I knew that was nonsense but felt nothing about it. When a doctor said to someone, ‘Call them and tell him he must hurry with that blood – say that he must run,’ I saw that things had gone further than I supposed but did not wonder whether he would run fast enough. When, a little later, they were discussing an injection and the same doctor said, ‘She’s very near collapse,’ I thought perfectly clearly, ‘Near collapse, indeed! If what I’m in now isn’t collapse, it must be their euphemism for dying.’ It did, then, swim dimly through my mind that I ought to think or feel something about this, but I hadn’t the strength to produce any more than: ‘Oh, well, if I die, I die,’ and that thought, once registered, did not set up any echoes. The things which were real were the sordidness of lying in a puddle of blood, and the oddness of not minding when they pushed needles into me.
I also wanted to impress the nurses and doctors. Not till afterwards did I understand that I had slipped back into childhood; that the total trust in these powerful people, and the wish to make them think, ‘There’s a good, clever girl,’ belonged in the nursery. I wanted to ask them intelligent questions about what they were doing, and to make little jokes – provided I could do so in not more than four or five words, because more would be beyond me. It was annoying that they seemed not to hear my little mumblings, or else just said, ‘Yes, dear,’ looking at my face as they said it with that same odd, examining expression. I made a brief contact with one of the doctors when he told them to do something ‘to stop me being agitated’. What I wanted to say was, ‘Don’t be silly, I can’t wait for you to get me down to the theatre and start scraping,’ but all that came out was a peevish, ‘Not agitated!’ to which he replied politely, ‘I’m sorry, of course you’re not.’ The only words I spoke from a deeper level than these feeble attempts at exhibitionism were when someone who was manipulating the blood bottle asked me if I was beginning to feel sleepy. It was during a wave of badness, and I heard my own voice replying hoarsely: ‘I’m feeling very ill.’
I had always dreaded the kind of anaesthetic one breathes, because of a bad experience when I was having my appendix out, but when I understood that they were about to give me that kind and began to attempt a protest, I suddenly realized that I didn’t give a damn: let them hurry up, let them get that mask over my face and I would go with it willingly. This had been going on much, much too long and all I wanted was the end of it.
The operation must have been a quick one, under a light anaesthetic, because when I woke up to an awareness of hands manipulating me back into bed, I was confused only for an instant, and only as to whether this was happening before or after the operation. That question was answered at once by the feeling in my belly: it was calm, I was no longer bleeding. I tried to move my hand down to touch myself in confirmation, and a nurse caught it and held it still – I hadn’t realized that there was still a transfusion needle taped into the back of it. Having moved, I began to vomit. I had a deep-seated neurotic queasiness about vomiting, a horror of it, and until that moment I would never have believed that I could have been sick while lying flat on my back with the bowl so awkwardly placed under my chin that the sick went into my hair, and been happy while doing it. But that was what was happening. An amazing glow of relief and joy was flowing up from my healed belly.
‘I AM ALIVE.’
It was enough.
It was everything. It was filling me to the brim with pure and absolute joy, a feeling more intense than any I had known before. And very soon after that I was wondering why they were bothering to set up a new bottle of plasma, because I could have told them that all I needed now was to rest.
So if I were pinned down to answer the question, ‘What did you feel on losing your child?’ the only honest reply would be, ‘Nothing.’ Nothing at all, while it was going on. What was happening was so bad – so nearly fatal – that it eclipsed its own significance. And during the four days I spent in hospital I felt very little: no more than a detached acknowledgement that it was sad. Hospital routine closed round me gently, isolating me in that odd, childish world where girls in their early twenties are the ‘grown-ups’, and the exciting events are visiting time and being allowed to get up and walk to the lavatory. When it was time to go home I was afraid that I would hate my bedroom, expecting to have a horror of the blackbird’s song and perhaps of some little rusty stain on the blue carpet, but friends took me home to an accompaniment of flowers, delicacies and cheerful talk, and I saw that it was still a pleasant room, my flat still a lovely place to live.
There was even relief: I would not now have to tell my mother anything, and I would not have to worry about money any more than usual. I could spend some on clothes for my holiday as soon as I liked, and I saw that I would enjoy the clothes and the holiday. It was this that was strange and sad, and made me think so often of how happy I had been while I was expecting the child (not of how unhappy I was now, because I wasn’t). This was what sometimes gave me a dull ache, like a stomach ache but not physical: that someone who didn’t yet exist could have the power to create spring, and could then be gone, and that once he was gone (I had always thought of the child as a boy), he became, because he had never existed, so completely gone: that the only tears shed for him were those first, almost unconscious tears shed by my poor old tortoise of a subconscious rather than by me. ‘I don’t want to have a miscarriage.’ Oh, no, no, no, I hadn’t wanted it, it was the thing I didn’t want with all my heart. Yet now it had happened, and I was the same as I had always been . . . except that now I knew – although if I had died during the miscarriage I would hardly, because of my physical state, have noticed it – the truth was that I loved being alive so much that not having died was more important to me by far than losing the child: more important than anything.